On Friday, August 31, 2001, at 07:10 AM, Fisher Mark wrote:
Look at how AP was used.
Mike, the main reason the Jim Bell prosecution started was his actions,
not
his words. Some of us on the list (myself included) would be majorly
upset
if a stink bomb strong enough to make us vomit was used on us (upset
enough
to want someone to take action against Jim Bell). Had Jim Bell
restrained
himself to speech, prosecution would have been much more difficult to
start.
Not impossible, but much more difficult.
Bell's cases and Parker's case(s) have been thrashed-over many times
here. Clueful folks like Duncan Frissell have outlined some of the
obvious errors (acted as his own lawyer, admitted tampering with mail,
the infamous Say goodnight, Joshua item, etc.).
I believe 10 years in prison is out of proportion. I have direct
knowledge of far more serious crimes, including arson, which resulted in
no prison time at all. Bell made various mistakes, but I'm not saying he
deserves 10 years in a federal prison. And the handling of the case was
strange. Others have written about it in a lot of detail.
Both the Bell and Parker cases involved identifiable actions that were
not just speech actions.
(To JA Terrenson/Measle, there _is_ a difference between speech and
action. Planting a stink bomb is not political speech. Tampering with
mail is not speech. Threatening harm, directly and specifically, is not
speech.)
I'll give you Tim's Tips on Avoiding Prosecution (worked so far...):
1. Never know the specific names of any judges or prosecutors. This cuts
way down on the chance that one will slip up and make a comment which
might be construed as a specific threat. Keep things general.
(I _do_ know the names of Jeff Gordon, Robb London, and Judge Tanner,
but only because there have been so many articles and items about them.)
2. Never, ever, make physical contact with Feds. Don't go to their
buildings unless required to, don't go near the homes or offices of
their employees, just avoid them completely. This makes stalking
charges mighty hard to press.
3. Don't attend People's Tribunals where specific agents, officers,
judges, etc. are to be tried for their crimes. We see that many/most
of these are infiltrated, and that, in fact, the chief rabble-rousers
are likely to be government agents or stool pigeons. (Some may be acting
to reduce other charges against them, as the Feds wanted Randy Weaver to
do--they set Weaver up with that quarter inch taken off a shotgun and
then wanted him to infiltrate the Northwest militias and narc them out.)
4. If whackos send you e-mail, don't respond. (I routinely discarded
e-mail from Vulis, Detweiler, Toto, Bell, and others I won't name for
reasons of politeness. Some of them sent me what I thought were side
channel communications which looked to be efforts to rope me into their
plans. Perhaps the lack of correspondence with Parker and Bell is what
saved me from being dragged in front of a grand jury.)
5. At physical Cypherpunks meetings, by all means talk about politics,
uses of technology, even anarchic things. But avoid being drawn into
debates about what to do to specific politicians, judges, etc..
(Attendees at Bay Area meetings will know that for 9 years now we have
had occasional heated discussions of these things, but we have avoided
the kind of people's tribunal crap that helped get Bell into trouble.)
6. Don't actually build bombs or modify weapons to fire in illegal ways.
These are actions, not speech. And neither are very useful. Perfectly
OK to talk about either thing (maybe not on the Cypherpunks list, for
reasons of relevancy), but may well be illegal to actually build. (It
is not necessarily illegal to build bombs, but the specifics matter. One
of the pyrotechnics newsgroups has discussions of this.)
7. Pay your taxes. Stay away from nutty schemes to not file tax returns,
etc. (Part of what got Bell charged the first time was failure to file,
fraudulent use of Social Security numbers, etc.) Arguing that taxes are
wrong, unfair, etc. is not the same thing as tax evasion. Even promoting
schemes to avoid taxes is probably not prosecutable (note that the book
writers usually only spend time at Terminal Island when they themselves
have used their ideas to evade taxes.).
8. Speech in purely electronic or written form is safer than speech in
physical forums. More time to redact words, more ability to modify
speech which might be interpreted as direct threats to a person. Less
chance to be entrapped by a provocateur.
See Rule 1: Never bother to learn the names of agents or judges. This
makes it much harder to slip up and say something foolish like We
should use AP to eliminate Judge Foobar! OK to say I won't weep if
Washington, D.C. is nerve-gassed by Osama bin Laden, as this is an
expression of opinion. Ditto for Shoot all politicians (a general
comment, overbroad, not specific, not credible
